Monday, June 30, 2014

In an opinion piece in Outlook
(“Chaining 1200 years”, 7-7-2014), Hasan Suroor takes issue with PM Narendra
Modi’s diagnosis that Indians suffer from a slave mentality due to “1200 years”
of oppression. He thereby defends the central falsehood that the Marxist
historians have introduced into Indian education, viz. that British rule was
colonial oppression while he preceding Muslim regimes were somehow indigenous.
Fortunately he makes no secret of where he himself stands: by classifying
Makkhan Lal as “ pro-RSS historian” but praising his opponent Mushirul Hasa as
a “noted historian”, he plays the well-known Leftist game of denouncing the
other as ideologically biased but their own as wearing the mantle of
objectivity.

The respective language policies already give the true
story. The British are remembered for imposing English as language of
administration and partly of education. But firstly, this was introduced
against a faction of administrators, the Orientalizers, who had preferred the
use of native languages (a faction unknown in the Muslim regimes), and
secondly, every British official had to take an exam of “Hindustani” before
even being posted to India. The Muslim rulers had mostly not even bothered to
learn an indigenous language and at any rate kept on using Arabic and then
Persian as medium to administer India. Muslim rule was even more colonial than
British rule.

To be sure, though Muslim regimes typically started out as
based in Central Asia and then expanded into India, they all lost their basis
outside India to their local competitors and then had to make do with India.
But that doesn’t make them less foreign. The White regimes in Rhodesia and
South Africa were also nominally independent from the European motherland but
were nonetheless treated as hold-overs of colonialism.

The British exploited India? So did the Muslim regimes. Land
tax was very high under the Delhi Sultanate and peasant famines as frequent as
under the British. Moreover, apart from their negative effect on Indian society
and the economy, the British cloud also had the silver lining of modernization,
as physically represented by the railway system. They “enslaved” India but also
brought the abolition of slavery (which they forced the Moghul and Ottoman
empires to abolish as well). The Muslim regimes cannot boast of such
contributions. On the contrary, they destroyed the Indian universities and
brought only the sterile dogmatism of Islamic theological academies in return.

As for “1200 years”, Suroor rightly considers this
inaccurate, as Muslim rule started in Sindh 1300 years ago, in most of India
centuries later, and in some pockets never at all. He also has the merit of
pointing out that it was effectively over in the 18th century, as
not the British but the Marathas broke the back of the Moghul empire. So, he is
right on this, but then, a political speech is not a Ph.D. dissertation. At any
rate, the fuss about the exact number of years is only meant to belittle Modi’s
message, which is in essence that Muslim rule deserves to be classified as
oppressive and colonial.

Suroor’s article is part of the “secularist” attempt to
keep control of Indian history. Not just the institutions, where the Modi
regime will have a hard time introducing more objective historians against the
anti-Hindu lot presently ruling the roost. But more importantly, the general
public’s perception of Indian history, which his own kind has tried to slant
communally.

In fact, experience teaches that the Marxists have little to
fear from the BJP. The textbook reform by Murli Manohar Joshi of ca. 2002 was a
failure. Subsequent Indologist conferences which I attended all had sessions on
history-rewriting, where the mood among the mostly anti-Hindu scholars was upbeat
and in expectation of a further decline of any Hindu activism. The conclusion
came down to: “The Hindu nationalists are unspeakably evil, but fortunately,
they are also abysmally stupid.” The Hindu movement has never bothered to
invest in scholarship and even after Modi’s accession to power, it simply lacks
the historians equipped to effect the glasnost
(openness) which a Marxist-controlled sector urgently needs.

Regardless of this power struggle between contending views
of history, however, at a deeper level the established historians have already
lost the battle. Of course, the anti-Hindu school has the key positions both in
the relevant Indian sectors (including Bollywood) and in the foreign
India-watching institutions, so they still keep the lid on this development.
But they have suffered some embarrassing defeats.

On Ayodhya, for more than twenty years they have managed to
make the world think that history is being falsified by Hindu extremists
asserting that the Babri mosque there had been built in forcible replacement of
a Hindu temple. This was in defiance of the preceding consensus among all the
parties concerned that there had indeed been a Hindu temple at the site, as
still asserted in the 1989 edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. But suddenly the consensus reversed, not because of any
scientific discovery, but because of political compulsions. Like babes in the
wood, all the India-watchers world-wide started toeing this new line and
lambasting the Hindus for “falsely” staying true to the old consensus. One
Dutch professor who had personally registered evidence for the temple, felt
compelled to eat his own findings and parrot the new consensus. Unfortunately
for all of them, the Archaeological Survey of India (2003) and the Allahabad
High Court (2010) reconfirmed the old consensus: of course, a Hindu temple had
stood at the site and had been forced to make way for the mosque. So, all these
Leftist efforts to impose a rewritten version of history had been in vain. Moreover,
in her recent book Rama and Ayodhya,
Meenakshi Jain has documented what a sorry figure these supposed “experts” have
cut when they were questioned in court during the Ayodhya proceedings. One
after another was forced to admit that he didn’t really know, that he hadn’t
been to the site though pontificating on its archaeology, that is was all just
a hypothesis. So, those were the people who had been cited as authority by all
the politicians, journalists and India-watchers. If the truth of their
politically motivated deception is given proper publicity, their game will be
over.

On Nalanda, the Left has staged a really daring history
falsification. This Buddhist university, then the biggest in the world, was
destroyed by Bakhtiar Khilji’s mujahedin in 1194, and has recently been
refounded under tight Leftist control. Today, the Buddha is being used as a
weapon against Hinduism, so the anti-Hindu forces would like to take possession
of the memory of Nalanda. Unfortunately, that would normally force them also to
memorize the way in which the historical Nalanda University had disappeared.
What to do? Well, in 2004, the then president of the Indian History Congress managed
to put the blame on the Hindus and simply ignored the true story, though as
usual it had been proudly proclaimed by the Muslim perpetrators themselves. As
Arun Shourie has shown (“How history was made up at Nalanda”, Indian Express, 28 June 2014), he
violated all the norms of his discipline by citing a hearsay foreign document
of five centuries later, and only giving a manipulated quote from it, all while
keeping out of view the real, immediate and contemporary testimony. The
historical fact that Nalanda was destroyed by warriors for Islam still stands,
but the reputation of this prominent Leftist historian among his many parrots
should be revised.

The anti-Hindu bias taught by the History professors also
translates into a bias on contemporary matters, where it has not fared better. In
autumn 1996, I attended the Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin.
The NDA alliance led by the BJP had been in power for 13 days and was widely
expected to accede to government for real. The Indian, American and
Indo-American academics at the conference outdid each other in doomsday
predictions: Fascism was going to be installed, the Muslims were going to be
thrown into the Indian Ocean, the Government was going to come down on
Dalits/women/artists/journalists, India was going to attack Pakistan, and so
on. The BJP did come to power in 1998 and led the government till 2004, yet
nothing at all of these dire forecasts came true. The BJP observed all the
democratic procedures, Pakistan attacked India (Kargil) but not the reverse,
and on the social front nothing sensational happened, except that the economy
boomed. Rarely has an army of accredited “experts” been proven so completely
wrong.

In 2002, in spite of BJP rule, Muslims felt confident enough
to start a pogrom of 59 Hindus in Godhra. Hindus had not reacted to a series of
Islamic terrorist acts including attacks on the Parliament buildings in
Srinagar and Delhi, but this time they finally did. Communal riots ensued,
killing some 800 Muslims and 200 Hindus. Bad enough, but by Congress standards
not that unusual: the 1984 massacre of Sikhs by Congress Party activists killed
3.000, and afterwards Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi had only seen fit to
minimize the issue. This time, however, the man in charge had the wrong
political colour: Gujarat CM Narenda Modi. He was accused of being complicit in
the riots, or even of having organized them. Though he was campaigned against
and scrutinized like nobody before him, he was repeatedly cleared by the
courts. All the Indian and foreign “specialists” who go on accusing him, are
simply in contempt of court.

Moreover, he has been accused of piloting history textbooks
that praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust. Naturally, this propaganda
offensive too has been copied in media around the world. However, investigation
of the textbooks showed that these did not praise Hitler, did mention the
Holocaust, and had been issued by a previous Congress government anyway. But
this follow-up did not get any attention in the world media. The slander may
have been successful in the short run (e.g. I heard it cited and discussed in
all seriousness in a session on Hindu-Jewish relations at the American Academy
of Religion Conference in 2009), but truth has a way of prevailing in the end.

Modi’s accession to power and the respect he clearly enjoys
among the neighbouring governments (and even in the US, which has to rescind
its visa ban against him, in spite of the pressure by Indo-American Leftists)
may well be an apt occasion to rethink our attitude towards the ideological
power struggle in India. So far, Indians and foreigners, and even many inside
the BJP, have looked at India through the glasses which the wrongly-named
“secularists” have put on their noses. Millions of people busy with other
things have relied on the “experts” to decide for them what is what, not
realizing that the positions normally associated with expertise have been
cornered by a politically motivated school. It is time to change this power
equation.

Meanwhile, we can already free ourselves from this school’s
exceeding sympathy for the Muslim regimes in Indian history. These regimes were
part of a long intermezzo of oppression, which has conditioned the minds of the
Indians (especially of those people loyal to the native civilization) to
attitudes of servility. It remains to be seen whether Narendra Modi’s
government will live up to the expectations. But by publicly redefining the
intermezzo of colonization as including the Muslim period, he has already
changed the terms of discourse.

It claims that “Rome’s
church compound is in the shape of [a] Shiva Lingam”. It also suggests, citing
as its source the “famous historian P.N. Oak”, that Vatican comes from Sanskrit vatika
(“park, religious centre”), Christianity
from Krishna-niti (“Krishna’s
policy”, "the way of Krishna"), and Abraham from Brahma.
Conclusion is that it’s all “plagiarism by the West”.

In fact, the shape of the
church is standard, and therefore the claim implies that most classical
churches, thousands of them, are really shaped like Shiva Lingams. If your eyes
are very hazy, you might indeed get the impression of a similarity. This school
is quickly satisfied with a mere semblance of similarity. Thus, a 3-shaped
sign in the undeciphered Indus script is declared to be Om/Aum sign; as is a
door ornament on the Red Fort, equally deemed to have been “originally a Hindu
temple”. But even if a more perceptive look were to confirm this impression of
similarity, it doesn’t prove a causal relation. The likeness between vatika and Vatican is claimed to “prove that the Vatican was a Hindu (Vedic)
religious centre before its incumbent was forced to accept Christianity from
1st century AD”. No, this phrase merely shows the miserably low standards of
proof applied by the Hindu history-rewriters. Also, no evidence is attempted,
or known from elsewhere, for the momentous replacement or forcible conversion
of this Vedic pontiff.

As for the etymologies,
they are false. Vaticanus (collis) means
“seers’ hill”, from vates meaning
“seer, poet, inspired speaker”, related to the Germanic god-name Woden, meaning “fury, trance”. Christianity combines the Latin endings -(i)anus and –itas, meaning “follower of” and “the property/system/collectivity
of”, with the Greek word Christos,
“anointed”, as translation of the Biblical Hebrew word Mashiah, “anointed crown-prince, messiah”. Ab-raham is Hebrew and means “father of many ”, while Brahma originally means “great, growth”,
related to Germanic berg, “mountain”.
These Biblical words have nothing to do with their Sanskrit look-alikes.

Further, it claims that Amen really comes from Om/Aum. Amen is Hebrew for “certainly, reliably”, and has nothing to do
with Om/Aum. For that matter, the
frequent assertion in some yogic circles that Latin omnis, “all”, is also related, is equally untrue. Omnis is a phonetic adaptation from op-nis, with the root op-, “many”, related to the
Latin-derived word opulence. The word
amen is cognate to Arabic ‘amin, which also means “certain”. A
well-known Urdu word derived from it is mo’min,
“one who takes as certain”, “believer”, hence “Muslim”. So according to these
history-rewriters, a Muslim really is an “Om-sayer”!

It further claims that “all
religions are one and are derived from Vedic Sanatana Dharma” and that “both
Christianity and Islam originated as distortions of Vedic beliefs”. This is
flatly untrue, but nonetheless Padres and Mullahs will welcome it if it helps
in reconciling Hindu parents to their daughter’s elopement with a Christian or
Muslim and conversion to his religion: “Hey, mom and dad, don’t worry, it’s
only a variation on the Vedic religion, as you yourselves always say!”

So, the very numerous PN
Oak-party among the Hindus is not only an endless source of laughter for all
enemies of Hinduism. It is also a useful fifth column within the crumbling
fortress of Indian Paganism. For the sake of Hindu survival, it is vital that
real history gets restored: against the secular anti-Hindu version, but also
against the Hindu caricature.

Friday, June 13, 2014

Taking fresh inspiration from a lecture I
just heard, I would like to go into a subject that has been drawing my
attention for some time. Today, 30 April, the Indology department of Ghent
University hosted a lecture by Dr. K.D. Vinayachandra from Jain University in
Bangalore on “The Aryan Invasion Theory” (AIT). Since we have amply dealt with
the subject before, we leave out the generally known elements (which were duly enumerated in the lecture) and
focus on what struck me as relevant to our own topic.

Among AIT critics in India, it is customary
to foam at the mouth when speaking of the Western inventors of the AIT. They
were, so to hear, evil people with imperialist motives who “concocted” a
scholarly theory to suit political ends. We will first show that this is
factually incorrect, then focus on the problematic mentality that produces such
moralistic tales.

Genesis
of the AIT

In a speech in 1786, Kolkata judge William
Jones announced the common origin of the Indo-Aryan languages with Iranian,
Greek, Latin, Germanic and Celtic. Among these sisters, he characterized
Sanskrit as clearly the eldest and most refined. Jones was literally part of
the British colonial establishment, yet his discovery of Indo-European kinship
was not yet tainted by political calculations. It was still the pleasure of
discovery speaking.

Since then, and with the subsequent
appropriation of Sanskrit linguistics by European scholars, Indians have taken
a renewed pride in Sanskrit. Modern-day Indians’ opposition to the AIT often
translates into a rejection of the notion of this linguistic kinship among most
North-Indian and most European languages, but the initial reaction was one of pride.
I imagine the Chinese would have felt insulted if their language had been ruled
cognate to that of the Western barbarians, but the Hindus felt sufficiently
humbled by centuries of Muslim rule and by the increasingly invincible British
paramountcy, and so they were flattered by this kinship. It constituted a form
of equality or even cultural superiority, as Sanskrit was deemed older and more
refined than English. The discovery went hand in hand with a great Western
interest in Sanskrit literature, another source of self-flattery for the
Hindus.

The first theory of a homeland for the
Indo-European language family was the Out-of-India Theory (OIT). But as it was
realized that Sanskrit differed from the putative common mother language
Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the homeland was also removed from India, so that
some version of the AIT had to be adopted. Initially not very far: Bactria
remained in the running as homeland candidate all through the 19th
century. Russia and the Balkans came later, and the choice of Germany or the
Baltic as homeland only came in the later 19th century, the heyday
of racial considerations, when Greco-Roman references to their heroes
(Achilles, Cato etc.) as blond led to the unjustified assumption that the PIE-speakers
must have been blond. This was the time when Benjamin Disraeli said: “All is
race, there is no other truth.” (1844) and: “Race is the key to history”
(1880). Though these considerations would no longer stand the test of science
in our own day, the scholars acted in good faith from what they considered as
relevant data, not from political calculations.

It is only in a second stage that
politicians saw the potential of these homeland theories. In Nazi Germany, a
European homeland was taken for granted (though Heinrich Himmler’s research
unit Ahnenerbe also thought of
Atlantis) because the superior Europeans could not possibly come from backward
India. In India, even before the colonial rulers, it was the Christian
missionaries who saw the uses of the AIT, mainly to pit Dravidians and
low-castes against the “Aryan invader” Brahmins and thus make them more
amenable to conversion. Even then, they did not “concoct” anything, e.g. when
Friedrich Max Müller wrote to his wife (as quoted in the lecture by Dr. Vinayachandra)
that India was ripe for Christianization and that his own translation of the
Rg-Veda would contribute to this by disenchanting the Rg-Veda and making the
Hindus understand and hence reject the root of their religion for their own
good, he still based this insight on the best and sincerest translation he was
capable of. And then the administrators did the same: with the AIT, they could
pit communities against one another, and most of them against the Brahmins who
were the backbone of the Freedom Movement. It also served to justify their own
presence in India: they were purer and more enlightened cousins of the
upper-caste Indo-Aryans who had done the same thing long ago, viz. invading
India.

Colonial
context

The context in which the Aryan Invasion
Theory took hold in British India was the age of the British East India
Company, when colonialism was changing its character. From trading lucratively
but as equals with the Moghul and Maratha empires, the British increasingly
insinuated themselves into the power structure and then took it over. With the
abolition of slavery in the early 19th century, they saw and
presented their colonial project as socially and culturally beneficial to the
natives. Indeed, in Africa they presented colonization as the best weapon
against Arab slavery, and in 1856 they forced the Ottoman empire, in return for
support during the Crimea war, to abolish slavery as well.

Yet, at the same time the British made a
move which, as it gradually gained momentum, would ruffle some Hindu feathers: introducing
an anglicizing education policy. Mind you, in their first half-century, they
had pursued an “Orientalizing” policy, consistent with their attitude of
equality or even formal subservience vis-à-vis the native powers, and with
their frequent intermarriages with native women whom later generations would
consider racially inferior. However, Thomas Babington Macaulay declared in 1835
in his Minute on Education that the
natives would be better off by having an English education. He saw this as a
form of emancipation and ultimately a preparation for self-rule. Nowadays Hindu
activists hate him and falsely ascribe destructive motives to him, as if he
thought very highly of Hindu culture and wanted to demote it. Just the opposite
is the case: he thought that one British library shelf held more knowledge than
all of Sanskrit and Indian vernacular literature combined. So, he wanted to
free the Indians from their underdevelopment and elevate them through English
culture. The false quotation that portrays him as a wilful destroyer, and that
is quoted in speeches by leading Indian politicians, is contrary to the spirit
of the times among colonial administrators. They saw themselves as the forces
of progress and civilization, and thought they were doing the natives a favour
by freeing them from their “superstitions” and uplifting them to the British
level.

Strictly speaking, Macaulay didn’t even
anglicize India. He only wanted a class of “interpreters”, who could
communicate British modern culture to their vernacular-speaking compatriots.
Once English culture had been interiorized and its insights translated into the
native languages, the Indians would be free to revert to those. Today’s
omnipresence of English and the requirement of knowing English in most
professions beats Macaulay’s vision a hundredfold and does not deserve to be
called “Macaulayism”. It is purely the fruit of a policy option by Indian
politicians, who somehow insist on subservience to English even long after the
British colonizers have gone.

Hindu activists also imagine that somehow
India was or is the central focus of the British colonizers, the American
imperialists and everyone else. The world has it in for India, the world
intends harm to India. Well, no: the world doesn’t care about India. At their
worst, the British colonizers were interested in loot, in material gain, and
India along with other colonies was a means to that. It is frequently said
(even, to his shame, on LK Advani’s website) that the famines in British India
were “the worst genocide in world history”. Apart from being an obvious excuse
to sound secularist and look away from the wilful Muslim massacres, more
deserving of the term “genocide”, it is simply not true. It is not that I doubt
the death figures, eventhough I have learned by now that these are usually
susceptible to exaggeration, but those dead were mere “collateral damage” of
lucrative economic policies, not intentional victims of an extermination
policy, a defining requirement for a “genocide”. The colonizers had nothing
against the Indians, they merely wanted to make money. If an occasional Indian
labourer died, the exploiters took that in stride, but it was not their
intention, they simply didn’t care one way or the other. That is not nice, but
it is not genocide either.

Fundamental
moralism

The tendency to portray the AIT as the
result of a conspiracy is only one case of a more general problem. Activist
Hindus tend to conceive most things in terms of good vs. evil. This is in stark
opposition to the genius of Hindu tradition. While Christianity is all about
sin, about God descending on earth just to deliver us from evil, the Vedas
acknowledge the existence of evil but relegate it to the second plan, the
foreground being taken by the struggle for liberation. Some people consider
themselves very profound when they declare that this world is really a struggle
between good and evil. In fact, this is cheap, vulgar and untrue.

Most things in this world are neither good
nor evil. These categories only apply to a very small class of phenomena. When
a tsunami destroys villages, the destruction is resented by the villagers and
their relatives, yet the oceans and rocks had no evil designs when they
unleashed this tsunami. For the unemployed construction worker, the tsunami is
even good news, for it creates a big new demand for the services of those
workers who will rebuild the villages. Good and evil are relative to the goals
they further or thwart, and people have conflicting goals. Moreover, numerous
things are simply too far removed from any human project to be able to further
or thwart it. But most importantly: even things that some people are bound to
resent as evil, were intended by its agents as good.

So, there is something ridiculous about the
constant indignation in many Hindu activist writings. The constant attribution
of evil motives and deliberate destructive strategies behind anything they don’t
like, comes across as a symptom of paranoia. I have experienced this attitude
numerous times among Hindus, yet I don’t blame Hinduism, on the contrary. In
the Ramayana and Mahabharata, every evil deed is given a fairly decent cause.
Every hero suffering reversals partly has himself to blame. It is not a
simplistic black-and-white fairy-tale. It is not for children but for
grown-ups, complex and, to use the Hindu term, “karmic’. In comparison to them,
the story of Vishnu’s future incarnation, who has as his mission to “kill the
evil-doers”, is very cheap, a sign of decadence. Similarly, the cool and
detached attitude that struck me among common Hindus whom I met around
tea-stalls in Varanasi in 1988, contrasts sharply with the shrill and extreme
attitudes among internet Hindus.

The Aryan invasion theory and the negative
influence of Macaulay’s education policy should be corrected. But this should
not be done, nor has it a chance of being done, by concocting these moralistic
stories of pure Indians versus the evil besiegers of India.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Anti-Hindu writers love to portray Hindu revivalism
as a form of “fascism”. Given the Hindu movement’s record of service to
democracy and abiding by democratic norms, they have a hard time sounding
serious. Fortunately for them, they find perfect allies in the rare but vocal
Hindus who do applaud Adolf Hitler.

Wendy
Doniger

During the commotion around the publisher’s
withdrawal of Wendy Doniger’s book Hinduism,
an Alternative History, the author herself held a plea pro domo: her
article “Banned in Bangalore”, NYT, 5 March 2014. In it,
she mocked the ignorant Hindu objection by Dina Nath Batra in his official
complaint “that the aforesaid book is written with Christian Missionary Zeal”. When
an internet Hindu reproduced this allegation, she replied: “Hey, I’m Jewish.”
So far, so good: it is fair and correct to notice that Hindu activists are too
smug and too lazy to study their enemies, so that they make embarrassing
mistakes about Wendy, including her religious denomination.

But then: “I was hit with a
barrage of poisonous anti-Semitism. One correspondent wrote: ‘Hi. I recently
came across your book on hindus. Where you try to humiliate us. I don’t know
much about jews. Based on your work, I think jews are evil. So Hitler was
probably correct in killing all jews in Germany. Bye.’”

This may be an invention:
the New York Times readers would not know the ins and outs of Indian politics,
but they can be counted on to hear the alarm go off at the mention of
anti-Semitism. So Wendy may have invented this case of anti-Semitism so as not
to have to bore her readers with categories on Indian public life which they
don’t know nor care about. As Vishal Agarwal (The New Stereotypes of Hindus in Western Indology, Hinduworld
Publ., Wilmington DE 2014) has documented, her contentious book contains
hundreds of wrong statements, from innocent slips and incorrect data to willful
and ideologically motivated misrepresentations. So, we should not deem her above
inventing this outburst. On the other hand, there really are internet Hindus
who are capable of utterances like this. They don’t write books or papers, but
the inboxes of Hindu activist websites have dozens of examples.

If the above-quoted e-mail really exists, we
can infer that it was written by a Hindu who had thus far been ignorant of Jews
and anti-Semitism (most Hindus are ignorant about the “Jewish question” in
Europe and the Middle East), and who became anti-Semitic on the spot, namely by
extrapolating from Wendy to her community, which upon her own declaration is
Jewish. The generalization from an individual to her community is of course
logically unsustainable, but very common among the kind of people who vent heated
reader’s letters. But all these details will be lost on the average reader, who
simply comes to associate “Hindu” with “anti-Semitism”. And that was the point
of her whole exercise. But Hindu loudmouths don’t see through such tactical
schemes and readily take the bait, freely providing their enemies with all the
anti-Hindu ammunition they need.

Hindu pro-Semitism

Hindu activism has always
been sympathetic to the Jewish people and Jewish state, at least since 1923
when Hindu leader V.D. Savarkar in his trail-blazing book Hindutva expressed his support for the Jewish project of a state of
their own. He had nothing with the Jewish theology of the Promised Land, which
he may even not have known, but he observed the nationalist logic that the Jews
were a really existing nation and therefore were entitled to their own
nation-state. That is also why the Hindu nationalist parties were the only ones
in India who, until the advent of diplomatic recognition in 1991, advocated
full relations with Israel.

Hindus in general have
always admired the revival of Hebrew as mother tongue of Israel, where Hindus
themselves are not even capable of pushing through a common second language to
replace English. They also feel familiar with Judaic believers as a fellow
target of the Christian missionaries, and feel an affinity with the Jewish
quasi-Brahminical book-orientedness and the ritualism, food prescriptions and
sheer ancientness of Judaism. For what it is worth: Aristotle thought the Jews
descended from “the philosophers of India”.

Yet, Hindus also have a
soft corner for conspiracy theories. In the past, they used to make up their
own. But now with the internet, they have access to the minutely developed Western
conspiracy theories, and the master theory among these is the Zionist World
Conspiracy. The blogsite Vijayvaani, for instance, has published a few articles
in this vein, e.g. that 9/11 was a inside job masterminded by the CIA together
with the Mossad. Amazing how the Mossad managed even to fool Osama bin Laden,
who genuinely believed that his Al-Qaeda men had done it; but anyway, that is
what millions of conspiracy theorists believe, now including some Hindus.

Quite separate from this
phenomenon, there is also a widespread sympathy for Adolf Hitler in India.
Among Indian Muslims, this has the same motivation as among Palestinians, viz.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism. This is ingrained in Islam and included in the
Prophet’s precedent behaviour: he partly exiled and partly murdered the Jews of
Arabia, where after the completion of his conquest no declared non-Muslim was
left alive. But the same veneration for Hitler also exists among Hindus, though
for very different reasons. Most Hindus only know of Hitler as the challenger
to the British Empire and thus indirectly as a factor in India’s independence,
while they denounce his enemy Churchill as a racist and as responsible for the
millions of deaths in the Bengal famine of 1943. Usually they don't know about Hitler’s
anti-Semitism and have only a vague idea of the Jews' place in European history.

A petition against Mein Kampf

In the spring of 2014, some
members of the professional Indology list issued a petition to dissuade the
leading publishing-house Motilal Banarsidass from republishing a translation of
Hitler’s book Mein Kampf. This book
is very popular throughout the Muslim world, but also in India. Motilal replied
graciously and withdrew the book from distribution. The petition’s author,
Prof. Dominik Wujastyk (London/Vienna), related on the list that many Hindus he
had spoken to, expressed admiration for Hitler, but once they were informed of
his massacring the Jews in his domains, they recoiled in horror and embarrassment.

Hindus have a very mistaken
view of Hitler. They don’t even realize that Hitler was only forced into war
with Britain against his will; that he favoured British domination over India
as the realization of his dream (white Aryans ruling over the “inferior races”)
and the model for his planned domination of his “vital space” in Eastern
Europe; that he opposed the Freedom Movement and advised the visiting British
Foreign Minister to have the Congress leadership including Mahatma Gandhi shot.
History moves in strange ways, and it is a fact that through WW2, Hitler
bankrupted Britain and forced it to relinquish its prized Indian possessions;
but he was no friend of the Hinduism or the Indians

Nazi Hinduism?

The blogsite Hindu Human
Rights (www.hinduhumanrights.info) has received an e-mail making the following four points, rendered with
corrected spelling. We will answer them one by one.

“1. The Myth of the Twentieth Century [by
Alfred Rosenberg] is the book on social ideology of Nazism which CLEARLY states
the state destruction of Christianity by proxies like Positive Christianity.
And replacing it by HINDUISM and German paganism.”

The Nazi high
command was inimical to Hinduism, which is briefly lambasted in both Mein Kampf and Hitler’s war-time Table-Talk, published by Henry
Picker. Rosenberg was frowned upon by Hitler and other high Nazis for
bringing in pre-modern concepts such as this “myth”. But as the Nazi movement
was not a monolith (fairly obvious yet news to most experts of the period) nor
a religious movement, his ideological idiosyncrasies were tolerated. Yet, even
he did not advocate Hinduism as the religion for Germany. Contrary to popular
opinion, a return to Germanic Paganism was also not favoured by the Nazis, and
emphatically denounced by Hitler in Mein
Kampf. The impression that the Nazis revived Germanic Paganism, eagerly
fostered by the Christians who try to pass as having been anti-Nazi all along,
is due to the 19th-century revival of Paganism-lite which had
entered general German culture somewhat, principally the celebration of the
Solstices and the use of a particular type of candle. These were incorporated
in the rituals of the Hitler Youth and the SS, not because they were Pagan but
because they were German.

Post-Christian
society does not want to do away with the scientific worldview and admits at
most of a very restricted rehabilitation of religion, divested of all its
superstitions. This was what was meant by the “positive Christianity” enshrined
in the Nazi charter, the party’s official religious commitment (as opposed to
Germanic Paganism, which later on was even outlawed along with all other
non-conventional religions or “cults”). Though raised as a Catholic, later in life
Hitler became a typical ex-Christian, retaining a soft corner for Jesus (whose
alleged “work”, the struggle against Judaism, Hitler flattered himself as
continuing, and whom he defined as blue-eyed and non-Jewish), but ridiculing
belief and religiosity as such. Thus, he mocked his Spanish allies during
Spain’s civil war, who should have relied on their prayers to the Virgin Mary
rather than on the German air force to defeat their enemies.

While
rank-and-file Nazis usually continued their Christian practices, the Nazi
leadership consisted of hard-headed military men contemptuous of any religion.
Yet they appreciated the organizational achievements of Christianity. Thus, the
SS was partly inspired on the Teutonic Order of warrior-monks, and dimly also
on the Jesuit Order. Hitler also lambasted systems of hereditary priesthood, which
Hindus know well enough through the Brahmin caste, praising instead the
Catholic system of celibate priests, necessarily drawn from the common people
and thus in greater solidarity with the nation than can be expected of a
priestly class locked in its separateness.

The Nazi
attitude to Christianity is complex and is not helped by simplistic notions
such as Pius XII being called “Hitler’s Pope”. The Nazis had Christian roots
and largely Christian voters (in particular, their anti-Semitism had never
existed in Germanic Paganism but was central to the Christian scheme), but in
the event of victory in World War II, its top cadres planned a secularization
and a replacement of Christianity by secular nationalism. A symbol of this
planned reform was the replacement of the Christian greeting “Grüss Gott” (not
by “Grüss Wotan” or “Grüss Krishna”, as this Hindu Nazi implies, but:) by “Heil
Hitler”.

Maybe our
Hitler-admiring correspondent is not a Hindu but a secularist. Hitler, at any
rate, had no Hindu leanings but was very much a secularist.

“God-believing”

“2. 4% had converted to German Paganism and 1.5-2% to atheism. These pagans and
atheists where the most dedicated Nazis. Source: State University of New York
George C. Browder Professor of History College of Freedonia (16 September 1996),
Hitler's Enforcers : The Gestapo and the
SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution: The Gestapo and the SS Security
Service in the Nazi Revolution, Oxford University Press. pp. 166–. ISBN
978-0-19-534451-6. Retrieved 14 March 2013.)”

The 1939 census
listed more than 90% of the Germans as Christians, thus necessarily also a
majority among those who had supported Hitler in coming to power. It is not
fashionable in Christian circles to bring up this fact, as they prefer to
highlight anti-Nazi Christians (such as the Weisse
Rose student group) and falsely pretend that Christianity was as much a
force against Nazism as against Bolshevism. Hindus who want to study any aspect
of National-Socialism or World War II are very poorly equipped to see through
this pro-Christian and anti-Pagan slant in many works on the subject. We have
the impression that our correspondent has swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

In this
Christian climate, the “atheist” category, good for some 2%, was frowned upon
and identified with “godless Bolshevism”. That is why atheist-minded Nazis
joined the other category, Gottgläubig,
“believing in God”. This was a vague category of “unspecified religious”,
including deism, German peri-Christian mysticism (Hildegard von Bingen, Meister
Eckhart, Cusanus, Rudolf Steiner), pantheism, Germanic Paganism and other
excentric religions. The reduction of this category to “Germanic Paganism” is
ruthless Christian propaganda, then already used to mobilize the Anglo-Saxon
populace against the Nazis, who were depicted as bizarre exotics and Satanists;
and it has only spread since and is even being taken over by a Hindu who
fancies himself anti-Christian.

The category
included many pacifists and other groups temperamentally disinclined to
strong-arm Nazism. But yes, it also included Nazis: a top Nazi who strongly
identified with this category was Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS. He was
creating a new religion out of the bits and pieces he found in many places:
memory traces of ancient Germanic religion (the seeress Weleda), Germanic
folklore, German-Christian mysticism, German-Christian nature lore, Christian
organizational forms, witchcraft and excentric forms of modern science. The
religion essentially died with him. It was an interesting attempt of what
people will try when the post-Christian condition leaves them looking for
something to fill the “God-shaped hole”. But with their own rich and unbroken
lineage of spiritual masters, Hindus surely have no need for this syncretic
attempt at all.

The Aryan Invasion Theory

Replying to an
argument in an earlier discussion about the so-called Aryan invasion of India,
but relevant here, he also reveals:

“3. I am an Out-of-India
theorist. Which puts proto-Aryans’ light-brown [skin] with dark hair and eyes
like North-Western Indians. On what basis [have] you claimed I consider blonde
and blue 'better'?”

Apparently, our
correspondent has earlier been accused of considering one race better than
another. We simply accept his protestation that he rejects any claims of racial
superiority. But he should expect this kind of allegation if he perforce wants
to speak out in favour of the Nazis, who did believe in racial superiority, and
very firmly.

In the Nazi
scheme of things, the Aryans had invaded India, tried to protect their genetic
purity by imposing caste apartheid, but ended up mixing with the natives to
some extent. (This scenario is still taught by most Indologists, secularists,
Dravidianists and neo-Ambedkarites.) So, to a Nazi, any Indian is definitely
inferior: either he is an inferior native if Dravidian or low-caste; or he is
an upper-caste Indo-Aryan with some superior Aryan blood in his veins, but
unfortunately mixed with some native blood. That is why North-Western Indians
are more European-looking, but not fully: their Aryan racial purity has been
compromised by some admixture with the dark-skinned natives. So, to Hitler’s
mind, they are better off being ruled by the superior pure Aryans from Britain.
That is why during their only meeting, he told collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose
to his face that Indians have the best possible deal as colonial underlings.

At any rate, the
Aryan Invasion Theory was a cornerstone of the Nazi worldview, taught in every
Nazi-controlled school. They had it in common with their arch-enemy Winston
Churchill, who used the AIT to justify the presence of Britons in India, who
had only taken over India the same way that their Vedic cousins once had.

Obviously, the
superior Aryans had to have originated in Europe, and then proceeded from there
to colonize India, as was their wont. Anything coming in from India was tainted
with the inferior native race, witness the Gypsies. In order to racially purify
Europe, the Gypsies along with the Jews had to be removed, first according to
some yet to be worked out master-plan, then during the war by simple
extermination.

If our
correspondent really is an Out-of-India theorist, then on this point he is
diametrically opposed to the Nazi position.

Bhagavad Gita

“4. The Nazis
had often quoted the Bhagavad Gita to the SS, famously by Himmler. Goebbels had
criticized the British take-over of India heavily in his news articles. In the
time when the majority of Western countries heavily supported racism (see the
reaction to the Japanse proposal of equality in the League of Nations), the
CLEAR claim of Goebbels of India as great and ancient... and then the specific Nazi
glorification of Hinduism in their literal scriptures speak for themselves.”

In the racial
worldview of the Nazis, the biological inferiority of the Hindus was an
overriding fact. That is why Hitler mocked their supposed otherworldliness, a
trait typical of inferior people who fail in this world and hence have to
withdraw in an imaginary world. This in contrast with the down-to-earth
Germanic realism, which naturally had to result in competence, victory and
conquest. (The exception were the marginal Germanic neo-Pagans, whom he also
mocked because they lived in the past and dreamed of a pre-Christian utopia
instead of embracing the post-Christian world of science and domination.) But
the Gita, being ancient, could be stretched to have been written by the early
Aryans who had freshly entered India and were not yet tainted by racial
admixture.

At the same
time, Orientalism had deeply penetrated German culture. While it could be
denounced, it could not entirely be wished away. And so, yes, it had affected
Himmler, who swallowed all he could lay his hands on in terms of the occult,
secret societies and unconventional religion. He did not propagate the Gita, as
some Hindus seem to believe, but he did read it and took some ideas from it –
while very purposely leaving out others.

Nazism was still
in its infancy and could have taken very different directions. The Army High
Command, for instance, invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 thinking it was
starting a brief local war, more or less completing the German claim on
historically German lands (if, as nationalists often do, you only consider the
time of your nation’s greatest expansion). It did not glorify war, which it saw
as an extension of politics, meant to project power conditioned by a political
plan. There was no plan to conquer Germany’s Western and Northern neighbours,
for instance, no ambition to rule these countries, and they only embarked on
this invasion (May 1940) reluctantly, with Hitler himself masterminding a very
daring strategy which wonderfully succeeded. The ensuing offensives likewise
established the German reputation for invincibility, which made many in India
go wild (including Mahatma Gandhi, whose Quit
India movement of August 1942 was predicated on an Axis victory). But then
Hitler’s strategic luck ran out, the generals tried to save the situation with
more careful tactics, but their position continued to decline to inevitable
defeat.

In this
scenario, not that unusual in military history, the SS and its view on war
stood out. Normally, war is sometimes considered a necessary evil, and then
embarked upon in a spirit of embracing the inevitable. This is also the case in
the Mahabharata, the larger work of which the Gita forms part: Krishna tries
non-violent solutions to the enmity between two groups of cousins, and only
when these fail, does he counsel a merciless war. This was the first point
where Himmler went against Krishna’s example, upholding a modern interpretation
of Charles Darwin’s evolution theory instead: war is a natural and good test to decide
who shall survive and who is not worthy of survival. He arrived at the view
that war for war’s sake is a good thing. It is only a careless and superficial
reading of the Gita (shared, incidentally, by Wendy Doniger) that can see it as
a justification of “war for war’s sake”. But I agree that a little knowledge is
a dangerous thing, and that the Gita can be a dangerous book in the hands of an
incompetent do-it-yourself amateur like Himmler (or a Sanskrit-knowing yet
equally incompetent Indologist like Wendy Doniger).

A second point
is the Gita’s doctrine of Nishkama Karma,
“action without desire (for its benefits)”. We see traces of it in Himmler’s
decision to organize the “final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe”. This
expression already existed in the 1930s and meant a planned emigration of the
Jews from Germany. A forced emigration is neither pleasant nor fair, but at
least it is preferable to being slaughtered. Its relatively innocuous meaning
changed drastically in 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. At first,
German Jews were being resettled in the conquered territories, but this proved
impractical and external emigration was now ruled out by the war circumstances.
So something more sinister was being worked out: the secretive extermination of
the Jews. People knew vaguely of a plan to deport the Jews to new settlements,
so they were not overly upset when they saw the Jews around them being taken
away. In some occupied countries, even Jewish committees themselves helped
organize the deportation to what they thought were new labour sites in the
East.

What did happen
was that Himmler took it upon himself to do what race theorists thought best
for the German people: eliminate the Jews. He accepted that his SS men would handle
this tough task. He relieved even ordinary soldiers of this difficult task, for
he had seen how killing, as with a neck shot, was difficult and often became
unbearable for ordinary men. He saw this as a kind as ascetic dutifulness: take
upon oneself a thankless task, not expecting any reward but doing what has to
be done. This ascetic sense of duty could easily be sourced elsewhere, e.g. in
Stoicism, widely known among the educated classes of Europe; but it is also
present in the Gita, though nowhere applied to the task of extermination.

He could perhaps
have used Krishna’s explanation that killing isn’t really killing, just as
dying isn’t really dying, because death is only like taking off your clothes to
put on fresh ones tomorrow, i.e. in a next incarnation. But he didn’t. Possibly
he believed it himself, but as a Nazi, he did not want to propagate an
airy-fairy pre-modern doctrine like reincarnation. The Nazi scheme nowhere
envisions that the Jews were destined to come back to haunt their killers. The
karmic implications taught by the Gita and by much of Hindu tradition did not
figure in Himmler’s plans. Nor did the bulk of the Gita, dealing with the
Sankhya philosophy’s worldview and its applications, with the need to become a
yogi, with the worship of Krishna etc. So, maybe Himmler got a few
half-digested ideas from the Gita which he could have gotten from elsewhere
too, and most of the Gita’s 18 chapters simply have nothing to do with his
project.

As for Joseph
Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, I know only little of his very
considerable output, and have never heard of his utterances in favour of
India’s independence. If true, I would expect them to be plastered all over the
place by the numerous intellectuals who have an interest in associating
Hinduism with Nazism. At any rate, if true, it was never taken over by the Nazi
movement or regime. Goebbels has a record of deviating from official Nazism,
and not always in a good sense. Thus, he was responsible for the Kristallnacht vandalism and murders,
which heavily damaged Germany’s international standing, was resented by the common
Germans because they had never voted for riots and disorder in their streets,
and disapproved of by the other top Nazis. Not because these disapproved of
ill-treatment of the Jews, but because they didn’t want disorder and unexpected
private initiatives.

That
National-Socialists praised Hinduism to the skies and fostered studies of
Indian culture, is a fable spread by anti-Hindu authors such as Sheldon
Pollock. At most, some Nazis could be found who praised the culture of the
still-pure Aryans entering India. Really existing Hinduism, by contrast, was
only looked down upon. If living in the Nazi era, our Hindu correspondent could
expect to be treated like the Gypsies.

Conclusion

Our
correspondent ends his mail in the all too familiar scatological fashion: “If
you are unable to give credible answers to these points and break them, based
upon reliable references, you are the son of a bitch, a proud brown babu of the
British barbarians. And all you can do is trolling like other idiots.”

It is easier to
catch mosquitoes with honey than with vinegar, so you would expect internet
warriors seeking to convince people to use agreeable language. Instead, many
internet Hindus couldn’t care less about the impression they make on their
public. After all, they are not into it because they are out to convince people
and score an argumentative victory. No, they are into it just to vent their
emotions. They foam at the mouth not because they somehow think this has a
better chance of convincing anyone, but because they have so much anger and
excitement in their hot heads that they simply have to let off steam.

As for the
contents, this man surprises outsiders by not thinking strategically at all. He
plays massively into the hands of the enemy. A general planning a battle should
study the strength and the characteristics of the enemy, as well as the
characteristics of the battlefield. This man, by contrast, seems oblivious of
the massive anti-Nazi mood in most of the world, which only gets grimmer as
time passes. India has the advantage of having extracted more good than evil
out of World War 2, of having terminated the war-generated animosities in 1945
itself, and of therefore being able to take a more distant view of the
different parties in that war including National-Socialism. But this doesn’t
mean that anything goes. Maybe the Holocaust and other war crimes did not
affect you personally, but the facts themselves have to be taken into account.

For victory, you
should not only know the enemy, you should first of all know yourself. In this
case, a knowledge of Hinduism would at once reveal the fundamental differences
with the Nazi worldview. Any contacts or similarities could never be more than
accidental. Thus, in the much-maligned Hindu caste society, the Jewish
community would simply have formed a caste (as indeed it did on the Malabar
coast), just as it effectively did in Germany for many centuries; the Nazi
desire to eliminate it, however, constituted a break with this arrangement.
Hitler may have been wrong on many things, but he was at least right in one
respect: that as a Nazi, he could only hold Hinduism in contempt. Either you
are a Nazi or you are a Hindu.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

On 5 June
2014 in Brussels, the Flemish skeptics’ society SKEPPhosted a lecture by Dinesh Mishra, an eye
doctor from the State Chattisgarh’s capital Raipur, since 1995
founder-president of the Andh Shraddha
Nirmulan Samiti, or “Committee for Eradication of Superstition” (and Social
Evils). He brought a positive message, testifying of a very necessary but
generally successful struggle against backwardness.

From his
profession, one might deduce that Dr. Mishra focuses on the instances of
medical superstition. Many illiterate people in the backward villages of
Chattisgarh forego taking their cases of illness to a far-away clinic but
instead go to the exorcist (baiga)
around the corner. These pretend to provide a cure by driving out the spirit
who has caused the disease. Moreover, they play a trick on their clients by
“proving” that they really have driven the spirit out by letting him bleed –
producing a blood-like substance by mixing a chemical with water. It is, thus,
needed to inform the common people of the irrationality at work behind this
ordinary trick but mostly behind the belief that diseases are caused by
spirits. What complicates matters is that even a “conversion” to real medicine
need not end the superstitious attitude, e.g. the unnecessary reliance on
antibiotics against all manner of ailments, causing the microbes’ increasing
immunity to antibiotics. Another danger is the tendency to relapse into bad
habits unless the commitment against superstition is regularly reinvigorated.

The most
important work Mishra’s association does, however, is protecting women against
allegations of witchcraft and the ensuing “punishments”. A video was shown of
testimonies by women who had suffered witchcraft allegations, or by murdered
women’s next of kin. It appears that in Chattisgarh and the surrounding states,
dozens of women are killed every year because they are suspected to have cursed
someone and caused a misfortune that befell him. Thus, a woman had taken a bath
in a kund, a bathing-pond. After
that, a group of visitors had taken a swim, and the villagers who took a bath
after that, contracted diarrhoea. Therefore, she was accused of having
bewitched the well and caused the epidemic. So, it is a matter of life and
death to expose and neutralize the superstitious assumptions behind these
witchcraft allegation. Fortunately, Dr. Mishra’s and similar associations can
claim quite a few successes where critical situations were prevented from
coming to the worst.

Perhaps due
to the limitations on his English, the doctor did not go into the wider
cultural background of this problem. I would like to contribute the observation
that the belief in witchcraft is not taken out just for the fun of persecuting
these women, but is present throughout these backward sections of society, even
among the affected women themselves. I have to emphasize this point against the
tendency among Western and secularist Indian commenters who take a very naîve
black-and-white view of this problem, as also against the skeptics’ typical
prejudice that unscientific “healers” are only deliberate deceivers. This is
not about wily charlatans versus hapless victims. Many of these exorcists
genuinely believe that their initiation and training has given them real power
to control disease-inducing spirits; deliberate deceivers are a small minority
compared to self-deluded people. And more to the point in this discussion: many
of the affected women, though entirely innocent of the misfortunes allegedly
caused by their spells, do indeed believe in witchcraft. As a social worker
once told me: if you give these illiterate people a little money, men will
spend it right away on drink – and women on witchcraft.

One very
commendable thing about Dr. Mishra’s work is that it is genuine. It is really
directed towards saving women’s lives and eradicating superstition, and not a
front for other agendas. It does not take money from foreign or internal
sponsors. In particular, when Indians declare themselves skeptics (“rationalists”),
they either really are, often as a corollary of their commitment to Marxism, or
they are agents of the Christian mission, resolved to turn the sceptical plank
against Hinduism: they highlight superstitions among the Hindu populace, link
these for the gullible Western public with Hinduism, and keep the Christian
superstitions out of view. These Christian superstitions are not just the
belief in a bleeding Mary statue, though India does have its share of these
too. Neither are they just the miracle healings staged during mass meetings by
Christian preachers such as the visiting American televangelist Benny Hinn. The
core itself of Christian belief, the Resurrection with its salvific effect on
sinning mankind, is very much an untenable belief, criticized no end by the skeptical
movement in the West. So, none of this improper use of skepticism for religious
agendas here.

Dr. Mishra
also had some Hindi booklets with him detailing different parts of his work.
One of them is indeed a reasoned plea against the belief that some particular
woman is guilty of some calamity by having pronounced a curse. Another is
against the belief that solar and lunar eclipses are events caused by a
heavenly monster. Already fifteen centuries ago, Indian astronomers gave the
scientific explanations of how sun-earth-moon alignments cause eclipses, yet
millions of villagers still treat eclipses like irregular events and bad omens.
There, he really gives a positive message to these unnecessarily panicky
people: take it easy, folks, there’s nothing to worry about!

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.